Toolbox crossovers vs parallels

[Aidan Wilson]

I also used virtual box on a linux host to run guests such as sun, free BSD, 
and Windows (I still use the same Windows 'disk' as I used back then; they're 
sharable too, they're just a .vdi (virtual disk image) file in the Virtal Box 
directory) and never had much of an issue. Haven't tried running it on a 
Windows host however.

I also used Wine on Linux and that worked okay. It got better with age, by 
which I mean that later releases were less buggy than the terrible early 
releases (but now I see the excellent pun). I haven't tried Wine on anything 
else but Linux.

-- 
Aidan Wilson

PhD Candidate in Linguistics
School of Languages and Linguistics
The University of Melbourne

+61428 458 969
aidan.wilson at unimelb.edu.au
@aidanbwilson

On Wed, 7 Dec 2011, John Mansfield wrote:

> Another Windows emulator is Wine. I haven't used it myself, but enough people have recommended it to me that I would check it out if I wanted to go down this path.
> I've had very thorny problems with VirtualBox - too much boring detail to describe here - but that was when I was using it to run a Linux virtual machine on a Windows XP
> platform. I.e., the opposite situation to what you're discussing. So maybe it runs more smoothly the other way round.
> 
> j
> 
> On 7 December 2011 11:30, Aidan Wilson <aidan.wilson at unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>       Hi Margaret,
>
>       I run Toolbox using a virtual machine through VirtualBox, a VM cient written by Sun Microsystems some time ago and since bought by Oracle. It's still free, but you
>       need to have an operating system to install on it. Windows XP is usually quite easy to find.
>
>       I've never used Crossover, but I've seen others use it an seen how clunky it can be to load software in it. Emulators in general I think can be a bit awkward, but
>       then again so can running an entire virtal machine for one program.
>
>       One good thing about virtualbox is that it has seamless integration with the host operating system, so I can now copy-paste between windows and mac, and I can 'hide'
>       the windows background and auto-hide the start bar, so it's essentially invisible, but the toolbox windows sit in the same space as everything else. You can also
>       mount local (host machine) directories, such as your entire home directory, on the guest machine so they render as networked folders (on a virtual network between
>       the host and the guest).
>
>       When I first used virtualbox, I created a disk image that had just about everything stripped out of it (IE, outlook, windows 'live' things, office things, etc.) so
>       that it was a really small operating system. Despite this it's still a huge space hog. And you also have to allocate a certain amount of ram to it for when it's
>       running, but as I only have a couple of things on it (toolbox and any other program I need that isn't available on Mac) it generally only needs 512MB ram. If your
>       computer has 2GB at least then this is a negligible loss.
>
>       The benefits of using a virtual machine increase when you need to add more programs, in my opinion.
>
>       Can't speak to parallels, but I've used VM ware fusion and I think the free and open-source Virtal Box is superior to it in every conceivable way.
>
>       --
>       Aidan Wilson
>
>       PhD Candidate in Linguistics
>       School of Languages and Linguistics
>       The University of Melbourne
>
>       +61428 458 969
>       aidan.wilson at unimelb.edu.au
>       @aidanbwilson
>
>       On Fri, 2 Dec 2011, Margaret Carew wrote:
>
>             Hi – just wondering who prefers using toolbox with crossovers – or is parallels better?
>
>             thanks
>             --
>             Margaret Carew
>             Arandic Endangered Languages Project
>             Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education
>             Alice Springs NT 0870
>             08 8951 8344 / 0422 418 559
>             margaret.carew at batchelor.edu.au
> 
> 
> 
> 
>